David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest

When I think of David Foster Wallace and his books, I am reminded of a great musical genius: Keith Jarrett (whom Wallace mentions in the first story of "Girl with Curious Hair"). Just as the great genius of the seven notes cannot be considered just a musician or a simple pianist, nor can he be framed in a single musical genre - as his work is something that transcends the notes, something that elevates (and alienates) you and takes you to an "other" dimension, bewildering you through the thousand colors, streams, and genres of his notes.

In the same way, Wallace, in my opinion, cannot be considered merely a novelist or writer or essayist, as his literary work is something that, first and foremost, touches on various aspects, using various languages (sometimes Pop, sometimes the so-called "academic" or "high") of our society, allowing for philosophical, sociological, psychological reflections, and also satire. In short, just like Jarrett, I believe that Wallace was a great thinker and philosopher of our time.

And just like Jarrett, through his music, explores, touches, and reinvents (in his own way) the various musical genres, ranging from Classical, to Blues, to Country, up to a certain type of contemporary Pop Music, all while - as music critic Franco Fayenz says - updating it in a present that isn't, in a wholly personal present of the artist; likewise, Wallace's writings are a kaleidoscope of literary genres and various narrative languages and styles - moving from writing that is sometimes ironic, sometimes classic, sometimes modern, sometimes experimental.

To stay within the literary realm, if we think of the great writers who have emerged over the last twenty to twenty-five years, the leading names among those who fit in the groove of that postmodernism marked by authors like Pynchon, DeLillo, and Roth, the most representative and talented pens are those of three great American writers: Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. If Eggers can be considered the great innovator regarding the narrative of the last two decades, and Franzen is the great novelist in the classic sense (the definition of a modern Tolstoy, in my opinion, is entirely fitting); Wallace fits, sometimes yes and sometimes no, into both streams: both in the one that goes towards a classic tradition, and in hysterical realism, which is one of the great keys of postmodern literature. But the writings Wallace has left us are something that fits into postmodernism, but are essentially something that transcends and, at the same time, mixes and synthesizes a vision both classical and postmodern.

Here, the monumental "Infinite Jest" is the culmination of everything that was David Foster Wallace: a storyteller, an innovator/restorer, an academic/anti-academic, a writer who, with his sarcastic yet never malicious view of the world, was able, in his pages, to depict the myriad facets of human beings...a true Great Human Comedy of Our Days.

Writing a review of "Infinite Jest" might seem titanic and complicated, given that the book is devoid of a true plot. The 1179-page volume, with an additional 100 pages of notes (a true trademark of Wallace) has addiction as its theme in its various forms and facets (from drugs to alcohol, from TV to beauty, from sports to food); with the action taking place in a near future (relative to when the book was written in 1996) that is very similar to our present.

Addiction, in all its forms, becomes a palliative, as well as an exemplification of an "antidote" against the inevitable loneliness and suffering of the secularized individual. Therefore, we have young tennis prospects, who live competition (which here also becomes a metaphor for the ruthless and unscrupulous competition of contemporary society) as a self-induced drug by parents who see in their children an antidote against their own failures and anxieties; young prospects who, taken by a frenzied and sick competitiveness, and by something imposed on them and not lived with joy and fun, fall into the spiral of drug and alcohol addiction seen as the only possibility - as happens also for many of their parents - to ease loneliness and pain. But addiction is also TV, watched compulsively by junkies, who live their drug addiction as addiction within addiction.

Just like advertising, which comes to pervade society to such an extent that years will no longer be called numerically, but with the names of advertising brands (Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, just to name one). But loneliness and suffering are also narrated through those who try to quit drugs (the Substances); then we witness the various struggles and regrets of poor Don Gately, who regrets a probable career in professional football in the name of his first and true great love, the Substance. In this whole scenario, there are ruthless separatist terrorists on wheelchairs, former comedians who become president of Onan (born from the unification of Canada with the United States and Mexico), people with monstrous appearances (who then are not so monstrous in reality, but perhaps represent one of the few possibilities of humanity and, therefore, salvation). Until a mysterious cartridge of a film thought to be lost, "Infinite Jest," appears, which is the ultimate of all addictions for anyone who sees it, to the point of reducing the potential viewer to a catatonic state that ultimately leads to death. So, the reader finds themselves catapulted into a reading that is a real kaleidoscope of characters, styles, and digressions (hysterical realism).

But does Wallace's book want to tell us that our nature, our society, our nature is something irretrievably lost in loneliness and pain, and that we are doomed to oscillate, like Schopenhauer's pendulum, between pain and a distraction from such pain through addiction? In reality, no, the American writer leaves us with a hidden and veiled (veiled like one of the protagonists of the book) possibility of "salvation" both inner and social, provided that we accept our own, and others', weaknesses and deformities (external and internal), that we accept defeat and do not live it as such. The much-mourned genius of Wallace creates a surreal social hyperuranium, which - in its being surreal - becomes the manifesto of what our era lives, and in a sarcastic and ironic way, it wants to warn us and indicate a possible way out and/or salvation.

Francesco Saglioccolo